Since the “Food project” has now brought its first stage to a close, it is time to present some preliminary findings.

With the funding provided by KNU, we have conducted a thorough interdisciplinary literature review and several pilot studies: a representative survey in sociology, experiments in economics, a qualitative and an automated content analysis in journalism studies, an analysis of social media content in communication studies, a metaphor analysis in linguistics, and narrative interviews in geography.

Our colleagues at the University of Colorado Boulder Media and Climate Change Observatory (MECCO) have spotlighted a long-time high in newspaper reporting about climate change – a trend we can substantiate with our own data on other news outlets. In September, media attention to climate change and global warming was at its highest level globally in nearly a decade.

The Center for a Sustainable University at the University of Hamburg has approved funding for the new research project “Sustainable Food Choices as Politics and Lifestyle”, which will start in spring 2018. The project investigates the drivers of food choices and how changing discourses, norms and attitudes about food relate to actual patterns of food consumption: What drives food choices and how are they influenced by ideas and discourses related to more sustainable lifestyles? This question will be tackled in a comprehensive interdisciplinary approach that looks at both, discourses about food and the everyday practices of food consumption. The researchers will analyze local media outlets and conduct surveys and experiments (in the WISO research lab).

As a kick-off for a new research project, the research team of Prof. Michael Brüggemann organized a workshop at the University of Hamburg from June 21 to 23. The team discussed the changing roles of science and politics in times of post-normal science communication with national and international guests.

At the International Communication Associations’ annual conference, which took place in San Diego/USA this year, researchers from our team presented first results from the Down to Earth project (“Climate Engagement in a Digital Age: Exploring the Drivers of Participation in Climate Discourse Online in the Context of COP21”) as well as research on how the COP21 was reported on Twitter (“Opportunity Makes Opinion Leaders: Analyzing the Role of First-Hand Information for Opinion Leadership in Social Media Networks”).

Besides, Michael Brüggemann was invited to a spontaneous interview with the online video literary magazine GuerillaReads, who “invited ICA presenters to share their work guerrilla-style. ”

Climate conferences serve multiple purposes. Besides being important political events, they are also global media spectacles which push the topic of climate change to the top of political, scientific and public agendas.

Scientific data is always at the heart of the way climate change is discussed. Whether it be weather records, measurement of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere or the PH-value of the oceans.

Since the official start of our CliSAP idea contest project in April, the CRG ‘Media Constructions of Climate Change’ has reached many important interim goals. A sample of online news media was assembled, currently covering 23 countries worldwide. It includes well-known media outlets like the American and international edition of the New York Times (USA), but also titles such as Jakarta Globe (Indonesia), Excelsior (Mexico) or Svenska Dagbladet (Sweden) – in total there are currently 42 media outlets included. Important criteria for the selection of the media were (1) the coverage, (2) the daily publication and (3) the national / supra-regional importance of reporting. The media sample is supplemented by an analysis of the climate discourses on Twitter.

Since July, ICDC has started the technical implementation of the tools. The online media monitor (OMM) is supposed to automatically store, analyze, aggregate, and visualize data obtained from global climate media reports, with results visible and usable for everyone. For this purpose, a program is currently being developed that extracts articles based on RSS feeds and exports them to a database. Afterwards, the implementation and visualization of the data analysis will be carried out. In the last phase of the project, automated content analysis functionality will be added to the tools in order to detect, for example, subjects or actors (such as countries, organizations, or particular scientists), and to visualize their activities.

CliSAP researchers at CEN shall be provided with the opportunity for further analysis of the data from the media monitor.